Weapons (2025) Review - The Monsters We Make
It is becoming increasingly rare to encounter a filmmaker whose second feature not only equals the promise of their first, but deepens it in ways you didn’t expect. Zach Cregger’s Weapons is such a film. His debut, Barbarian, was a lean, nasty, and wickedly surprising horror-thriller about trust, fear, and the unseen dangers in the walls – both literal and metaphorical. With Weapons, Cregger proves that his first outing was no fluke. He has command not just of scares, but of story, character, and the delicate art of using horror as a lens through which we can examine ourselves.
This is a horror movie, yes. But it’s also something rarer: a grief-stricken fable about the wounds we carry, the violence we absorb, and the ways those wounds echo through a community long after the headlines have faded. Its themes – some depicted literally and some only hinted at – of grief, school shootings, alcoholism, abusive childhoods, loss, blame, trauma, and the hesitant process of healing, are not presented as bullet points or lecture notes. Instead, they emerge in fragments, half-glimpsed until the story’s shape becomes clear. And even then, Cregger resists the neat moral closure most audiences expect.
Like Barbarian, Weapons is built to surprise you. It’s told through a nonlinear structure, hopscotching between timelines and perspectives, giving us pieces of a tragedy before we even fully understand what that tragedy is. At the center are three performances of quiet, devastating precision: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and young actor Cary Christopher. Each inhabits a character who reflects a different facet of the film’s central theme: how the human heart, when injured, can either close itself off in bitterness or reach out in fragile, trembling connection.
The adult protagonists here are not saints. Cregger has no interest in offering spotless heroes. They are flawed, sometimes painfully so. Brolin plays a man whose stoicism masks a rotting core of regret. Garner plays a caring but often self-destructive teacher who cannot quite stop herself from crossing lines that institutions tell her are forbidden. And Christopher, the youngest of the three, embodies the perspective most of us try not to imagine too closely – the child whose life has been marked by violence that will be replayed in whispers for decades.
One of the film’s more thought-provoking scenes is foreshadowed early, when Garner’s character is scolded by a school administrator for her history of overstepping boundaries. She is bureaucratically reminded that physical contact with students is against policy. Comforting a crying child with a hug is not allowed. These rules are, in theory, about safety. But later, in a flashback, we see her essentially disregard this rule when she finds a student whose behavior has her genuinely concerned for their well-being and offers them a listening ear. The camera lingers on the moment – not as a grand act of defiance, but as something small and human. It is this contrast that Cregger mines for one of the film’s most piercing questions: Have we, in the name of safety, stripped away the very gestures that would help keep us and our children safe in the first place?
Weapons exists in a fictional suburb, but it’s the suburb of our collective imagination – the one with perfect lawns, PTA meetings, and quiet streets that become crime scenes when the unthinkable happens. Cregger understands the horror of that façade: the way a community can seal itself off, hiding dysfunction and cruelty behind manicured hedges and seasonal wreaths. The danger in the film may or may not be supernatural, but the real danger is in the slow erosion of trust. Fear, suspicion, and blame seep into every interaction until even kindness becomes suspect.
It would be easy for a filmmaker to tell this story in the register of pure tragedy – solemn, award-bait, wrung dry of life. Cregger refuses. He wraps his darkest material in the form of a fairy tale. Not a bright, Disneyfied one, but the old kind: where the woods are dangerous, where monsters are made of human cruelty, and where rescue is never guaranteed. The nonlinear structure, the shifts in tone, the almost dreamlike transitions between timelines – they all contribute to the sensation that we are being told a cautionary tale by a storyteller who knows the ending but is not ready to give it to us yet.
Cregger’s control over tone is remarkable. There are moments that will satisfy horror audiences looking for the kind of nerve-twisting suspense he mastered in Barbarian. But those moments are surrounded by quiet, lingering images. The horror here isn’t confined to sudden shocks – it’s in the weight of the air after something terrible has happened.
The performances are what make all of this work. Julia Garner gives one of the finest turns of her career, playing a woman whose sensitivity is both her strength and her liability. Josh Brolin delivers a performance of weary restraint, allowing us to see the fault lines in a man who has spent weeks trying to hold himself together. Cary Christopher is a revelation – his work is natural, unforced, and all the more powerful for it. Together, they create a portrait of a community’s grief that feels lived-in and heartbreakingly real.
Cregger’s direction is confident without being showy. He knows when to pull the camera close, trapping us in a character’s private turmoil, and when to hold back, letting the distance itself become part of the emotion. The editing – sharp, deliberate – gives the nonlinear narrative clarity without sanding away its mystery. And his use of sound is extraordinary: quiet is never empty here. It hums with what’s been left unsaid.
Twice now, Cregger has shown us the underbelly of the worlds we think we know, the rot beneath the suburban dream. He understands that horror is not just about what jumps out at you – it’s about what’s always been there, hiding in plain sight. And he has a gift for smuggling difficult truths into the framework of a movie you want to see with a crowd on opening weekend.
There is an art to creating a film that works as both entertainment and as a mirror. Weapons delivers thrills, twists, and set pieces that will make audiences gasp. But it also sends them home with questions – about the world, about the choices we make, about the role we all play in either breaking cycles of harm or reinforcing them.
By the time the credits roll, it is clear that Cregger is not simply a promising horror director – he has rapidly become one of the most vital storytellers working today. Twice now, he has held up a mirror to our collective faces and refused to let us look away. We should be grateful, even if what we see there frightens us.